Translating the NGSS: Analysis Guides Transcript

Speaker 1: You want to think about whether this particular activity is going to serve the unit of instruction that you will be planning this afternoon, and relate it to a particular E in the Five-E sequence. That's where we're headed.

Speaker 2: Her best of the five tools and processes for translating the next generation science standards into instruction and classroom assessment was to develop a professional development process to help teachers bring the next generation science standards to life, get the NGSS into their bloodstream.

Speaker 1: So [Dora 00:01:11] is going to hand out the analysis guides. Get familiar with the guide and think about some of the patterns that you see in the guides.

Speaker 2: At a high level, we want teachers to have experienced planning in a way that is highly supported and scaffolded and closely linked to the next generation science standards.

Speaker 1: Each analysis guide has an Identify, an Analyze, and a Revise component, the ultimate goal being to determine whether you keep the activity as it is, tweak the activity because it needs a little beefing up, or whether you toss the activity.

Speaker 2: We took time to support teachers in planning for instruction using the tools and resources that we've gone through over the course of the day.

Speaker 1: One of the resources is what we call "Analysis Guides." It really is just some boxes with some questions in them, maybe some check boxes, some places for evidence, to help you think about whether a particular activity has utility in the instructional sequence that is being planned. It's a tool to help you analyze any "O" activity out of any "O" book or one that you've created yourself to see how well it might fit a particular purpose within the Five Es.

Speaker 2: While the groups are working together, they bring their materials, the activities that they might be considering, curriculum materials, textbooks if they have them, handouts, things like that, and they spend that time using the analysis guide to review those activities. They talk to each other.

Speaker 3: I'm not confident that they already know it.

Speaker 2: But if they don't - that's the question. If they don't know it ...

Speaker 4: You mean night and day?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: I think they would know it.

Speaker 2: So can you say more, [Vito 00:03:10], about what you think they would know about night and day?

Speaker 4: I think they would know that half of the planet is in daytime and half is in nighttime. I think they'd know that there is night and day, and I think they might know that it has to do with the earth spinning.

Speaker 3: I think many of our students believe that the sun goes around the earth. That's what they experience. Most of my students come in with that misconception. I wonder if that could be an engage.

Speaker 2: And as facilitators, we go around and sit with groups and do some coaching work with them to help them think about their sequences.

Speaker 1: What's really important about this conversation is that you're thinking about what students already know, what they're bringing in to the classroom, or not, and then what you're goiing to do in response to whatever it is that they know or don't know.

Speaker 2: Would you give two probes, like one about night and day and one about seasons to see what the misconceptions are?

Speaker 1: Generally, you want to get out as much information in the engage as you can about the ideas that will be developed over the course of the sequence, and in your anticipation guides, do you do the true, false, and why you think that so that you get a little bit more information?

Speaker 3: Usually in my anticipation guides, I do the true/false in the first round, and there is an after that they come back to, and that's when they provide a justification. First, they're just noting their general feeling, and later they come back and justify it once they have gotten from the lesson what they need to get.

Speaker 2: The thing that's different about the probe is how it's a story that's relatable, and you just pick who you agree with and explain why. I'm wrestling with, like ...

Speaker 4: I think the probe is better for, maybe, one specific thing as opposed to what you want to try to do.

Speaker 2: That's where I'm torn, because I know the value. I want to get the ideas, the misconceptions for everything. This is after we broke it down and left the moon out too.

Speaker 1: Can I go back to just one more idea? Can they explain it? Can they explain the influence that day and night has on seasons? Or more specifically, to what extent are students able to explain the role day and night plays in average temperatures on earth?

Speaker 5: When I would actually teach this, there are some concepts that I would bundle in.

Speaker 2: Can you just add some of those ideas in?

Speaker 5: That's what we're looking at doing right now.

Speaker 2: If you think there are other ideas that make sense to teach with these ideas, you can go back to tool one now and add those in.

Speaker 1: We're providing you this particular tool, this template of boxes with some questions in it, to help you engage in the kind of thinking that an expert does. We want to support them in developing the habits of mind for them to plan additional instructional sequences when they get back home.

Speaker 2: It's not easy to take our cross-cutting concepts and a science engineering practice and a disciplinary core idea and combine them to make these performance expectations, and to design a lesson that meets that is definitely challenging. I'm in the [inaudible 00:06:29] and we're using the five tools. I'm excited to see our product and where we get to at the end of this.

Speaker 6: Describe the relationship of kinetic energy to the mass of an object and the speed of an object.

Speaker 5: We do have the word "kinetic energy."

Speaker 6: Yes. What you don't have is the idea of, like, transformations from potential to kinetic and back.

Speaker 2: So by engaging in professional development workshops that create learning communities, now you can talk to some other sixth-grade teachers, people who have been teaching sixth grade, and get ideas from them, resources from them, and so on.

Speaker 1: Planning instruction doesn't have to be an individual endeavor. Moreover, it should be a collaborative effort because we all have our strengths, and by bringing together teams of teachers who are committed to the same instructional sequence, who are committed in the best possible outcomes for student learning, we're much more likely to get high-quality instruction and to ultimately improve student learning, because that's what it's all about.